Month: July 2010

Wow! What an amazing month. We launched the Kootenay Network on July 1 in public beta with the goal of providing you, our beloved region, a place to connect with friends, swap stories, and find the news and information that’s important to you.

The launch was meant to be a “soft” launch — a semi-secret beta release that would introduce the site to a few people for the purpose of testing our system in a live environment. July and August were meant to be a time for fixing bugs and making improvements to our design, in anticipation of our September 10 public launch.

But the word leaked out and you responded more positively than we could have imagined! In the last month, we had 6,632 visitors to inthekoots.com and almost 50,000 page views (we should reach that number by the end of today0. And we have seen at least those numbers on our various Facebook pages, Youtube channel, and Twitter feeds.

Network traffic for July 2010

No matter how big our online community grows, I want to sincerely thank you, individually, for choosing to be a part of our community (even if that just means checking out an occasional story on News in the Kootenays or clicking on the occasional Facebook Like button). Every single person is a treasure.

I also want to thank you in advance for being patient with us as we continue to test our systems, fix bugs and make improvements to our design. Please send us your feedback or bug reports to [email protected] Thanks again!

I’m not one to dwell on the minutiae of life, which is a shame. The best writers seem to be able to see, and help us appreciate, the magic in our day-to-day world.

I also try to avoid generalizing.

So with both of those things in mind, my bit of amazing news is this: the transit bus into to Nelson from the north shore is actually full! Normally I’m one of only three or four people. If this happens one more time, I’m going to call it a trend and start interviewing people about what’s going on. I got the headlines ready: “Transit ridership up 2000%” or “The bus is really cool again, say local kids”.